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June 30, 2009

After disgraced financier Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison and Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers resigned… Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry wonders: has justice been served?

When I got to my office yesterday, one of the secretaries smiled at me. “There, you see, the system does work,” she said.

She was happy for a couple of reasons.

Monica Conyers, possibly the most flamboyantly bizarre politician in the history of Detroit City Council, was quitting.

Last week she confessed to accepting bribes in a sludge-hauling scandal, and is expected to be sentenced to prison.

While that was happening, a federal judge was sentencing crooked investor Bernie Madoff to the absolute maximum -- a century and a half in prison. That’s pretty symbolic, since Madoff is 71, but it was meant to send a message.

Unfortunately, I think it is the wrong message. In my view, the system isn’t working, and works even less well in Michigan than it does in most other places in this country. To deal briefly with Madoff, yes, he may finally have gotten what he deserved.

But so what? His stiff sentence does nothing for the thousands whose savings he destroyed and whose lives were ruined.

If the system worked, some regulatory body, or bodies, would have caught on and stopped him a long time ago.

The same is even more true in Michigan. Yes, Monica Conyers was, thanks to determined effort by law enforcement agencies, caught accepting bribes. Last year Detroit’s mayor was forced to plead guilty to two felonies and resign. Three years ago council member Alonzo Bates was convicted and went to prison.

So does the system work? Guess what. If your health care plan only kicks in once you are diagnosed with terminal cancer, you don’t have very good medical coverage. If our national, state and local justice systems are only able to catch crooks after they’ve bilked the public for years, does that mean the system works?

By the way, don’t think this is a Detroit problem. Corruption may be a little more rampant in our biggest city for a number of reasons. The residents are poor, feel under siege, and may be more vulnerable to those who would exploit them.

But we’ve had plenty of bad actors elsewhere. And I fear that we have more than we know about, because once you get away from the major population centers, there are all too few watchdogs.

Print journalism is dying, and even where papers are still publishing daily, they don’t have as many of those pesky, scruffy, nosy people called reporters as they used to.
Even in Detroit, many things are still left unexplored. For example, nobody has yet completely traced Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun’s interlocking financial and political connections.

And when it comes to financial disclosure requirements for public officials, The Center for Public Integrity ranks Michigan dead last, in a tie with the tiny states of Idaho and Vermont.

It may soon get worse.

Michigan has outlawed direct political spending by big corporations on behalf of political candidates. But yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would reopen that case, and the odds are that they may overturn that ban.

We could end up with the worst government that money can buy. I don’t know about you, but that scares me.

That’s a familiar feeling in Michigan these days. But last week, something did go right. Two somethings, in fact.

On Friday, General Motors announced it would build a new small, fuel-efficient car at a plant in Oakland County’s Orion Township. That means twelve hundred jobs were saved that would have been lost. Michigan was competing against Tennessee and Wisconsin, and we won. Nobody knows exactly why GM made that choice, but this much is clear: Michigan officials pulled together and worked hard and creatively in order to make it happen.

Originally, a factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee appeared to have all the advantages. As the Detroit Free Press’s Katherine Yung noted last weekend, Spring Hill is a more modern plant.

It also has a paint shop. The factory in Orion Township didn’t have a paint shop, and you might have figured that was that. Especially since it costs around $180 million to build one. But spurred by pressure from Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation went to work.

The MEDC set up what amounted to a war room, where staffers monitored what the other states were offering. Eventually, they cobbled together a bunch of business tax incentives and offered GM a tax credit package worth $779 million.

The governor lobbied GM intensely, and in the end, it all paid off. Now, there are those who think this whole decision may have been political. After all, the government now owns most of General Motors. Michigan has the nation’s highest jobless rate, and state Democrats could use a break before next year’s elections.

Tennessee, on the other hand, is hopelessly Republican. Did the President intervene here? People in the know say not. The governor was told flatly that this would be a business decision, and Obama’s auto task force would not be involved.

The day before that welcome auto news, the state scored another coup that could have even greater potential implications.

General Electric announced it would hire more than a thousand workers for an operation in western Wayne County that will focus heavily on renewable energy, especially the form the governor is most passionate about: wind technology. In this case, there is evidence that the President pushed GE to consider Michigan. What matters, however, is not how we got the project, but that we did.

The governor has long had a vision of the state turning to wind power, not only as a source of energy, but as a major source of new jobs making the components that make wind energy possible.

We simply don’t know how much long-term economic potential this will have. But it seems clear that it ought to position Michigan as a national leader in wind energy technology.

We aren’t out of the hole yet, by any means. But this may have been Jennifer Granholm‘s best week in office. And this time, she deserves considerable credit for making both things happen.

June 26, 2009

Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has announced that she will not run for Governor in 20-10. The Republican has, instead, endorsed Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard for the job. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of Land…

What do Terri Lynn Land and Michael Jackson have in common? Well, they were both born the same year, 1958.

And yesterday, one of them wanted to make headlines, and the other actually did. For a politician, the most maddening thing about the news cycle is that you can never control what else is happening.

Yesterday, Land, who is Michigan’s Secretary of State, decided to end her brief campaign for next year’s Republican gubernatorial nomination and endorse Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard.

Unfortunately for them, they held their press conference the same day that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died and GM decided to build its new small car at its factory in Orion Township.

The net effect of all this was that Bouchard and Land ended up as a very small story deep inside most Michigan newspapers.

That’s life. On the other hand, you just know that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has to be wishing that he could have held his famous press conference yesterday. Instead, he wound up making his bizarre confession the day before, when virtually nothing else was happening. That left him as the main course on the 24-hour-news cycle menu pretty much all Wednesday.

But back to Terri Lynn Land. When I heard about her announcement I was startled, but not really surprised.

She has been one of the best Secretaries of State Michigan has had. She has improved service in a largely non-political way. She is also a throwback to an earlier, non-ideological era.

She is from Grand Rapids. Her political hero is former President Gerald Ford. I have a sneaking suspicion that she would eventually like to go to Congress from his old seat when the incumbent, Vern Ehlers, retires some day.

But her heart never really seemed to be in the race for governor. She never articulated a vision for this state. I suspect she began running because she was term-limited out of a job after January, and people told her governor was the logical next step.

There is also someone who she really doesn’t want to see as governor: Attorney General Mike Cox. Land and Cox hold each other in, as the saying goes, minimum high regard.

This announcement was calculated to help Bouchard, and it should. Cox, who is a tremendous campaigner, is probably still a slight favorite, but Bouchard is the only candidate who has won a state-wide GOP primary. The party’s other heavyweight, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, can’t be counted out, but is still virtually unknown outside his congressional district.

Some are asking today is whether Land traded her endorsement for a secret promise to be Bouchard‘s pick for lieutenant governor. The answer is almost certainly no, though she would be an excellent choice for gender and geographical balance.

Trouble is, they are both moderates, and their party increasingly leans hard right. In any event, Bouchard would be politically foolish to announce his choice till after he is nominated.

But whatever happens, I think we haven’t seen the last of Terri Lynn Land. Three years ago, she was reelected by a landslide in what was a big Democratic year.

Here’s an indication of how serious our problems in Michigan are. Yesterday, I had a hard time finding anyone who seemed the least bit interested in the South Carolina sex scandal.

That’s the one involving the governor who was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian trail, but who instead was off pitching woo in Buenos Aires. I did, however, hear one quintessentially Detroit comment from a middle-aged secretary. “Couldn’t he find an American woman to fool around with?” she said.
Bet she isn’t driving any foreign car.

We are at the beginning of summer, and that often amounts to what you might call our silly season. Suddenly, the news media tend to forget about budgets and deficits and wars.

Instead, there always seems to be some sort of bizarre scandal juicy enough to dominate cable TV for months.

Sometime this summer, if it is typical, someone will call in what police deem a credible tip about Jimmy Hoffa, and someone’s backyard will then be destroyed by a backhoe.

Later, a reporter will discover a growing movement in the Upper Peninsula to secede from the rest of Michigan and then either join Wisconsin or enter the union as the new state of Superior.

Stories will be written about this, local TV news crews will troop north, and then the ‘movement’ will mysteriously vanish, until next summer. In keeping with that frivolous spirit, Michigan’s largest newspaper, the Free Press, wasted paper yesterday to offer us an astonishing editorial on the wretchedly dysfunctional Gosselins, a family made famous and then destroyed by reality TV.

However, this year is different. I don’t sense that we’re in a silly mood. Michigan is facing conditions that in many ways resemble a depression, and things seem unlikely to get much better soon.

In Detroit, everyone is waiting to see when and if federal prosecutors will follow up on their hints and charge City Council member Monica Conyers in connection with a scandal allegedly involving bribes and a sewage contract.

Across the state, people are waiting to see if General Motors and Chrysler can emerge from bankruptcy and become profitable again. Those who follow politics more deeply are worried about whether our state can stay solvent.

The legislature is now attempting to come up with a budget, which by law has to be balanced. That’s seldom easy in good times. Today, putting together a budget that satisfies the bottom line without destroying essential services may be close to impossible.

Crafting one that both parties can live with may be much harder. We’ve had a state government for years that is as dysfunctional as the Gosselins, at a time when we can least afford it.

Somehow, I don’t think most people are willing to put up with this much longer. We are fighting for our lives in many parts of this state, fighting to stay here and give our kids a future.

We need leadership that will help us do that, by any means necessary. Those we’ve elected to lead us need to step up to the plate, regardless of party, inspire us and get it done.

Yesterday, as the state senate was getting ready to vote to wipe out the Michigan Promise Grant and some other college scholarship money for poor students, a few voices were raised in opposition.

Nancy Cassis, a Republican from Novi, tried to get her fellow senators to fund the program at a much-reduced level. Liz Brater, an Ann Arbor Democrat, said to eliminate the promise grant was more than just breaking a sacred promise to Michigan’s college students.

It is also a move designed to sabotage our state’s future economy. But Tony Stamas of Midland, the chair of the appropriations committee wasn’t sympathetic. He said “we don’t have the dollars,” which, in a sense is true. The state is running an enormous budget deficit, and painful cuts have to be made.

But then, according to the respected Gongwer News Service, Stamas added that the state also has a promise to keep prisoners behind bars. Well, nobody has been suggesting turning our serial killers loose to roam the streets. But I am struck by his choice of priorities. For years, it’s been clear that a big part of our economic problem in Michigan has been an insufficiently educated work force.

We have a smaller percentage of young adults with college degrees than our surrounding states, the ones that compete most heavily with us for jobs. There’s no great mystery as to why this is so.

For many years, you could come out of high school and get a good-paying job slapping fenders on cars or bending metal on an assembly line. Those jobs have vanished now, and aren’t coming back. Michigan needs to transition from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy, as fast as possible. The Michigan Promise Grant is designed to help do that, by providing scholarships worth up to $4,000 to college-bound kids graduating from Michigan high schools.

Lt. Gov. John Cherry knows how short-sighted eliminating the grant is. Five years ago, when times were still relatively good, he chaired a special commission that looked at higher education in the state. Its members concluded that we needed to start by doubling the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded within a decade. We are now running far behind that pace, and zeroing out the promise grant will set us back even further. “It’s so basic to your state’s future,” the lieutenant governor said yesterday. Ninety-six thousand students were depending on promise grant funding this fall.

The lieutenant governor argued that eliminating the promise grant would be like a farmer eating his seed corn.

But he failed by a single vote to sway the Republican-controlled senate. The senators also cut funding for other need-based programs, including competitive scholarships and tuition grants. They slashed money for nursing students at a time when Michigan has a dramatic shortage of nurses and has to import them from Canada.

Now, what the senate did isn’t the final word. The Democrats control the House, and some of this money may yet be restored.

But the senate’s action is profoundly dismaying. Our elected leaders are supposed to try to give us a better future.

June 23, 2009

We have so many problems today it’s hard to know what to do about them. If you want to make a difference, where do you start?

I was moaning about this to a friend the other day, and he said there was something I could do for Michigan if I moved fast. He recommended I try to make someone pregnant in the next week or so. He explained that the state needed babies no later than March.

That suggestion struck me as a trifle … bizarre. “No, really, I am serious,” he said. “In fact, you should get fertility drugs and try for a multiple birth.” His logic puzzled me.

But he explained: Michigan needs people. We are losing not only the economic wars, but the demographic ones.

Finally I got it: The Census. Every ten years, the federal government counts us. That is to say, they make a major effort to count us, sending out forms and sending enumerators to count those who don’t send them back.

There are people who live on relatives’ couches or in alleys, and they try to find and count them too.

That isn’t always easy. But it is necessary, and here’s why. First of all, so much is determined by how many people we have.

Federal and state aid, for one thing. Generally speaking, the more people you have, the more you get. That’s true for cities as well as states. But political clout is also determined by the census.

The U.S. House of Representatives has 435 members. Every state gets one to start. The rest are apportioned on the basis of population. Every ten years, they add up the figures and pull out the calculator and go to work. The faster-growing states get more congressmen. Those growing slower lose them.

Michigan gained big throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as the auto industry boomed. We gained clout in Congress, adding our final seat after the 1960 census. That gave us 19 seats in the house. Since then, however, the tide has been flowing in the other direction. We’ve lost four seats in Congress since 1970, the equivalent of Kansas’s entire delegation. My friend Kurt Metzger, a former census official who now runs the Detroit Area Community Information System, says we will lose another next year.

To minimize the loss, we have to try to make sure everyone is counted. This is not normally a big problem in better-off, single family home places like Chelsea or Ada.

But it becomes much harder when you are dealing with new immigrants, and poor and undereducated people who may be frightened of any contact with the government.

We know that every census misses people. That’s why it is so important that government at all levels mobilize to try to reassure people, educate them, and finally find them next April 1.

“There are no do-overs,” Metzger told me last week. “Whining about an undercount won’t change the results.”

He is worried that we aren’t doing enough to get ready for this, especially in the City of Detroit, which needs an accurate count most of all. So Mayor Bing …are you listening?

Here’s something I worry about that isn’t on the usual list of our state’s troubles, but which I think is pretty important. It’s a concept I call intellectual furniture. We don’t share as much of the same furniture as we used to, and I think that is a big part of our problem.

Let me explain. If I meet someone about my age who grew up in Michigan, I know automatically that we both remember Tiger Stadium, Al Kaline, Gordie Howe, and an appallingly long list of old advertising slogans. (Which way did he go? He went for Faygo!)

We remember Soapy Williams, the governor with the goofy grin and the green polka-dot bow tie, and how exciting it was when the Big Mac bridge finally united the two peninsulas.

Now, how can I be sure that someone born here in the 1950s knows all of these things? Simple. We were exposed to a common set of news media, all of which tried to provide us with a manageable digest of what was happening.

If you grew up in the Detroit area, I know that you got your statewide news from one of two newspapers, the News or Free Press, and from one of three local TV stations. If you lived In Kalamazoo or Flint or Grand Rapids or Muskegon, you got your news mainly from a good, solid local newspaper.

These papers largely resembled each other in structure and style, because they were part of the same group of eight papers in medium-sized Michigan cities. The others, by the way, were Jackson, Ann Arbor, Bay City and Saginaw.

And, whether you liked it or not, you heard news on the radio --even if you only listened to acid rock. That’s because the FCC, the Federal Communication Commission, required that every station provide some public service programming, including news.

That’s because the airwaves are public property. Broadcasting is legally a privilege, not a right, and if a station wanted to keep its license, it needed to serve the public.

News was one way to do that. The requirement that radio stations require news was dropped in the 1980s. The excuse was that it wasn‘t necessary, because there were now so many choices.

But too many people ended up not being exposed to news at all. The same thing happened with television. Now, newspapers, which always have been the main source of news of our communities, seem to be dying too.

Ann Arbor soon won‘t have a paper. Flint, Bay City and Saginaw have one only three days a week. The Detroit papers are increasingly dumbed down. Yesterday, with our state and its key industry in major crisis, the Sunday Free Press, the only paper available statewide, looked like a bad British tabloid. The main headline said: “Did cops grope 11 men in Detroit?“

Yes, there may be blogs somewhere with the information we used to get, but only a tiny fraction of the public knows how to find them. And I don’t think we can solve any of our state’s problems without a large number of reasonably informed citizens.

June 19, 2009

We are about to start feeling something that, until now, has been mostly theoretical. Namely, the effects of the ongoing “great recession” on services government provides.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a reporter in Lansing who said, “This ought to scare any thinking person in Michigan.”

An education bill passed by the Senate wipes out all funding for early childhood development, and bizarrely, also would do away with school bus inspections. And it cuts the amount of money the state provides for each pupil by more than $100 per student.

That means teacher layoffs. Now, that isn’t a final figure. The Senate is controlled by Republicans, and their priorities are quite different from the Democrats in the House.

But the bottom line is that there isn’t any money. The state has a giant sinkhole in its budget that is getting worse all the time.

As of last month, state revenues had fallen by 23 percent. According to Bob Emerson, the budget director, this was the worst decline since the Great Depression. Since then, the news hasn’t been any better. Unemployment last month jumped to 14.1 percent.

That translated into another $62 million the state was counting on that isn’t there. People who aren’t working don’t pay taxes. Some of this is being covered by a billion or so of federal stimulus money.

Even that isn‘t proving to be enough. Michigan is having to cut its budget, and then cut it again.

We‘re going to feel that when the kids go back to school thist fall, and in many other ways. Yet some are still playing politics. The latest skirmish is over the governor’s plan to lay off more than a hundred rookie state troopers, all of whom have been trained at considerable expense to the state.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop denounced this as “a way to say to the world we’ve lost our mind.” Crime increases in a bad economy, and he thinks we should be focusing more on law enforcement, not less. That’s reasonable, but disingenuous.

Especially since his Senate Republicans are calling for a further $4 million cut to the state police budget.

You can’t have it both ways.

We’ve all been used to getting services from the state that come so automatically we don’t think about them.

Except now we have to. We need our elected leaders to level with us, and offer us competing and honest visions for the future. There’s less money than there used to be.

There also ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Do we want what we are used to having?

If so, we are going to have to raise taxes. See, I said that and I wasn’t struck down by a thunderbolt. If we don’t want to raise taxes, we are going to have to be satisfied with poorer schools, less law enforcement and a lower quality of life in a number of ways.

We can’t have it both ways. Nor are we likely to always agree.

But what we can do is demand honesty and accountability from those we elect. We are facing hard choices.

June 18, 2009

And, it was learned, this week, that Detroit City Council member Monica Conyers was a target of a federal corruption probe. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry believes Detroiters are tired of these sorts of scandals are ready for a little more “grown-up” behavior…

I think a lot of folks around the state gave up on Detroit four years ago, when Kwame Kilpatrick was re-elected.

That may be starting to change now, getting better, ironically because times are no longer good. We are facing into the wind, all of us. We no longer have the luxury of behaving like a bunch of teenagers who found daddy’s credit card and are living like there is no tomorrow. Guess what.

Tomorrow’s here, on Eight Mile Road just as surely as in Escanaba. Now, you should know that the basic political rivalry between Detroit and the rest of the state is more than a century old.

For many years, that had nothing to do with race. The rest of the state felt Detroit got more than its fair share of resources and attention. There was some truth in that. By 1950, more than thirty percent of the state’s entire population lived within the Detroit city limits. Detroit’s share of the wealth was even larger.

Detroiters felt, however, that they were unable to get a fair hearing in Lansing.

That they were denied adequate representation, and that the rest of the state sometimes ganged up on them.

There was some truth in that too. Then the racial factor reared its ugly head. From 1974 to 1994 Detroit had a polarizing black mayor whom the rest of the state loved to loathe, and he seemed to return the favor. Much of the state regarded Detroit as East Berlin, and would have walled it off if they could. Then, soon after the real East Berlin vanished, a thaw began. We saw the dawn of a new era of cooperation and conciliation between 1994 and 2002.

Dennis Archer, a sober, responsible former judge who grew up on the west side of the state, became mayor of Detroit. He reached out to Michigan, and a rapprochement began. But then came the age of Kwame Kilpatrick. Suddenly, Detroit had a self-indulgent boy mayor who wore earrings and left limousines idling in the street.

The newspapers exposed his excesses, and the people responded by enthusiastically reelecting him anyway. You could feel the icicles forming from Bloomfield Hills to Charlevoix.

But times changed. The law caught up with Kilpatrick at the beginning of 2008. The economy crashed that fall. The party animal was gone. This year, when it came time to replace him, the voters seemed interested only in grownups.

They eventually chose a businessman who had once been an iconic basketball star, Dave Bing. This week, it was learned that the bizarre council member Monica Conyers was a target of a federal corruption probe. Reportedly, she‘s been offered a deal.

That would include resigning. I make no judgment as to her guilt. But there is a general feeling of relief in Detroit that this era might soon be over. Statewide, unemployment is fourteen percent and rising. The state is taking in less money every month, and the bills are past due. Someday, we may again be able to afford to be entranced by bad behavior. But not now.

When I was studying European history many years ago, I had to try and understand the Holy Roman Empire. That became much easier once I stumbled across Voltaire‘s famous quip that it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Which brings us to the so-called National Summit, a three-day gathering of politicians and business people in Detroit’s Renaissance Center. Now, I have no doubt that a national summit on the economy would be a good idea. America has enormous deficits, enormous debt and depends far too much on China and the Middle East.

However, what is happening in Detroit this week is neither national nor a summit. It seems instead to be a giant waste of time.

What I would expect a national summit to involve would be a gathering of world-class economists and the nation’s key political and business leaders. President Obama would open the proceedings, followed by somebody like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.

They would then proceed to have working sessions to hammer out a blueprint for our future. But that’s not what has been going on this week. Instead, a succession of politicians, local worthies, and mainly local business leaders made speeches at each other.

These included top officials of the auto companies, heads of smaller companies and chambers of commerce, and also a fair number of Canadian executives, which makes sense for this area, but made me wonder why they didn’t call it an international summit.

The governor spoke, and the heads of Michigan’s three major universities, and everybody else locally who needed to have themselves seen. However, some of the choices were baffling.

Charles Ballard, the ranking expert on the Michigan economy was evidently not invited. However, an engaging young woman named Becky Quick, who hosts a cable show called Squawk Box, was. What she and all the rest of them did was make speeches.

Highly forgettable speeches, most of them. The highest ranking political attendee was a member of the President’s cabinet. Here’s what his own press release said about his appearance: “U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today announced a new initiative designed to streamline government bureaucracy and bring services and solutions directly to businesses and entrepreneurs.”

I’ve read sexier sentences in the manual that came with my toaster oven. What’ s wrong with all of this is not just that the Detroit Economic Club put on a mind-numbingly boring event.

What wrong is that they bit off more than they could chew. We have a national economic crisis, true. But we aren’t going to solve that with a regional conference in Michigan. Even a good one.

But we also have a special form of crisis in Michigan, one we could do something about. Our core industry has fundamentally collapsed. Our political system is dysfunctional. Our state government broken. And our politicians and business leaders seem determined to drag our state over the cliff.

Now here’s an idea: Convene a real summit with the people who have the power to actually do something about that, and put pressure on them to do it.